So a new year is only a couple of weeks away, I’ve got a lot to be thankful for and more things I want to change. One of those is to write more. So my new year’s resolution is to blog daily, even if it’s just something simple. Hopefully, that’ll get me in the place to update my blog.
Blog
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December Men’s Breakfast
It’s always good to start a Saturday at men’s breakfast at First Christian Church. Good food and lots of it and I usually get a chance to catch up with Adrian. This Saturday we had the pleasure of seeing Charles Mason too, always lucky to see these two.
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Stars Game @ AAC
For the first time in two years we got a chance to take the train into Dallas and catch a Stars game!!! But we lost in pretty spectacular fashion 4 to 1. Oh well, they keep this up and seats will be a lot cheaper than $50 apiece:)
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Fedora 33 > 34 Update Complete
The computer updates have started. The new goal is going to move the current physical instance of my Linux server into a VirtualBox VM that will host everything until I can bring up RHEL on the new server hard drives and have it pick up things like web hosting and email. Once that’s complete I’ll decommission the VM, create final backups and be done with it.
I’ll try to document the process of how it works.
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Computer upgrades ahead
Just post to let you know that I’ll be upgrading the hard drives and migrating the OS to RHEL over the last quarter of this year. Should you hit a bookmark and nothings there, just wait, it’ll be back up better than ever shortly…
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Football is back!!!
Well preseason anyways. The Cowboys are playing this afternoon and there isn’t much to cheer about. The curse is real and they won’t go anywhere again this year. So that it’s in writing, I believe that because we’re looking at a 17 game season they won’t be 8 and 8! But I believe this doesn’t bode well for the boys and will result in a more pathetic than usual 7 and 10 season. They’re due a pretty big pummeling in the opener with Tampa Bay and that will set the tone for the rest of the season.
But beyond how badly they’ll be playing I’ll be hoping I’m wrong and they win. It’s also nice to have football back on. Once you get past the whinny people complaining that someone is taking a knee or what anthem is playing, it’s good to see physical competition in the goofy American ritual called football. It signals the start of school and the promise of cooler weather coming.
Life is good but life is short, enjoy the things that make you smile!
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1 Terabyte For Entertainment
So with the new phone comes a chance to start new. I hate that when switching phones they want you to bring everything over from your old phone. No!!! It’s time to start fresh, if it’s your favorite app, just get it again, or better yet, is there one that does it bigger, better, faster, cheaper?
That goes for content too, every phone has a SD micro card slot. Mine will accept a terabyte of data. Yes 1TB. Friggin thing costs $150 but now I have a terabyte that will be with me at pretty much all times. And yes it’s great for storing those high def videos but what else? For me, I’ve put my music collection on it. This is every piece of music I’ve every bought and then some. That is 210GB or 21% of the drive. Next time someone asks for that obscure song we listed to 30 years ago, got it and all the others too.
I’ve got 500 or so music videos, most from a time when MTV actually played videos, 20Gb, so not much there but literally days worth of music videos. That will keep you entertained on a plane and with a playlist and HDMI cable, it can be the life of the party.
How about movies? I currently have 1473 movies on my Plex server. Over 3TB, but I picked my top 25, something there for everyone and that’s just 50GB. Throw in another 100GB for audio and I’ve got about 500Gb of entertainment at my finder tips with room to grow.
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New Phone
So for a while now I’ve been looking at getting a new phone. I don’t have a phone plan, or provider or contract so what am I supposed to do? I use Google Fi and I brought my unlocked from Metro to Fi when Fi was a much better deal. But it’s mostly cheaper than anything else and I own the phone outright so it’s easier all around. But I HATE spending $1100+ for the latest flagship phone. So Fi had the Fi compatible (multi cell antenna) S20 Ultra. It was $800 and they’re giving me $200 back for my Note 9 which is in mint condition. so $600 for a new gen behind 5g phone. But it has the updated camera array which is what I was going for.
I had decided that the camera is what I was paying closest attention to, it’s the only thing I use that I want top of the line and I wasn’t going to change to Apple. The specs on the camera are pretty potent:
Main Camera Quad 108 MP, f/1.8, 26mm (wide), 1/1.33″, 0.8µm, PDAF, OIS
48 MP, f/3.5, 103mm (periscope telephoto), 1/2.0″, 0.8µm, PDAF, OIS, 4x optical zoom, 10x hybrid zoom
12 MP, f/2.2, 13mm, 120˚ (ultrawide), 1/2.55″ 1.4µm, Super Steady video
0.3 MP, TOF 3D, f/1.0, (depth)Features LED flash, auto-HDR, panorama Video 8K@24fps, 4K@30/60fps, 1080p@30/60/240fps, 720p@960fps, HDR10+, stereo sound rec., gyro-EIS & OIS -
Lost another high school classmate
I don’t think it’s been a year yet since an old high school classmate committed suicide and we’ve lost another member of the class of 90. Mike Wassink passed. I didn’t know him, I knew I went to school with him but that’s about it. Great guy from what I understand, we just never ran in the same circles.
For some reason I started looking up folks from the past, one of them used to be my boss when I drove a truck, Ralph Paglia. Good guy, evidently was one of the founders of auto sales marketing at the dawn of the internet. Passed due to Covid late last year. His Facebook, and linked-in are still sitting there, an algorithm someplace keeps track of the days since last log in. I wonder how long it will count before something is done.
It’s sad even if it is part of life. It is the final and unavoidable end to life, all life and as much as we try to comfort ourselves with religion and thoughts of an afterlife where we share eternity with loved ones, it’s hard to believe it’s real. At least it is for me.
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More hard drives
So as alluded to in a previous post, I had a drive crash and it left me feeling a bit shaky about the other three drives that are in the array, one more goes and the system is gone. Not thrilled with the thought of that so I blew $320 and got 4 SATA Seagate 4 TB drives. While I was thrilled with the SAS drives, the price and obscurity makes them not good for what I’m looking for.
The new drives are actually new so 5 year warranty so I figure my Linux server should be good until 2026:) Need to look into getting some more RAM, I’m at 16Gb but would rather be at 32, that will probably be the last thing I do for this iteration of the server.